On a Totemic Ancestor Who Just Moved In, Whales in a Lake, and Water Under the Ice
The ice is groaning, whistling, murmuring, you have a feeling of life happening under, a hidden, mythical, life, speed, stealth, strength.
And then it was Christmas, but before Christmas there was the Christmas Eve, and on the morning of that day, we go to the woods, and cut down an oak sapling, only, obviously, not if you are in Norway, and surrounded by the pine woods, and you know for a fact that there are exactly three young oaks in the two kilometers radius, you don’t cut down the whole tree, you take a branch, and that evening, you invite no guests, you have the Badnje veče dinner just with your closest family, and if you happen to be me, you also contemplate how delightfully pagan the Serbian Christmas Eve is, oak is the holy tree of the Slavs, and our totemic ancestor, you take him into your house, and formally welcome him, and that day you don’t eat flesh, nor any produce of warm blooded animals, that’s a kind of sacrifice, and then in the evening, you burn your oak branch, your Badnjak, for the old has to die for the new life to come.
Only, again, if you’re me, and you’re the only grown-up of the family, and you have people coming over for Christmas dinner tomorrow, and you have probably been cooking for sixteen or so hours, and know you have at least four more hours, you can’t really have a proper Badnje veče celebration, on top of it all, so you just skip the milk in your morning coffee, and dish out sushi for dinner (delivered, of course), and as you don’t actually have the hearth or any kind of fireplace to burn the Badnjak in, that would be another walk to the woods, and have I mentioned the Christmas dinner tomorrow, and the Christmas bread to be baked, and the roast, the potatoes, and all the fresh salads?
So, you put it in a vase, the big one that you had forgotten you had, together with some Christmas decorations and a spray of pine and you mumble something in the vicinity of “Sorry about this, Badnjak, I just don’t have the time, but it’s actually nice to have you around, I hope you don’t mind”, and then there’s the Christmas dinner, you gather your extended family, the one you made for yourself here, your daughters are there, of course, but also the kid who became your daughter’s best friend the first day at school a dozen years ago, and is now your daughter, too, and their Icelandic aunt, and the Norwegian uncle, and the two Icelandic cousins (those Icelandic genes are strong!), and a friend of twenty years who speaks Serbian as well as you do, only no one can place where in Serbia she’s from, no wonder, she’s from Norway.
And then we all hold the Christmas bread, the česnica, nine pairs of hands, and we turn it three times around, and break it, and one of the daughters finds the coin, and you try to explain to the Icelanders what žito (koljivo) is ( — So, some kind of holy porridge? — Eh, yeah, close enough… — Oh, it’s really good! — Of course it is!) and then you just chat and laugh and eat the sixteen dishes it took you twenty hours to prepare, and you do that for five or seven hours, and the day after you’re kind of tired, in any case too tired to go to the woods, and anyway the girls are going back to their father’s and you can’t go out to burn the Badnjak alone, it’s a family affair, you’ll do it the next weekend, but the next weekend you get the booster that really knocks you out, and then they’re back at their father’s, and then some are quarantined, and then some others are, and the days go, and then a week, the girls are not back, and the Badnjak, he just lingers on.
I miss my daughters, I go to the lake, I take long walks on the ice, it’s overcast, but the snow is shiny and white, the winter is deep, the lake feels closer, more familiar, covered in ice.
The Christmas is now way behind, and I need to take out the last rests of it, the spray of pine feels wrong, I buy a small branch of magnolia and some eucalyptus, and put them together with the Badnjak, and I look at the incongruous creation and I think: That’s exactly how i feel! A Badnjak completely outside its settings, still calm and reassuring, in that particular way only oaks can be, and magnolia, sleeping, sleeping, a promise of spring, and then suddenly, thick, protective caps of the buds fall off, and the blooms come forward, all crumpled and sleepy and mushy, and pink and beautiful, and a sprig of eucalyptus, the name I have known of forever, a plant I know absolutely nothing about. Never seen it before. Have no idea how the actual tree looks like. Is it tall? Eaten by koalas, right? Poisonous? No, that’d be the bamboo. Is that the one that sheds its bark when it’s too hot?
A complete confusion in a vase! I smile at it when I drink my morning coffee at the table, you and me both, I think, you and me both.
The weather grows mellow, temperatures above freezing for way too long for this time of year, in daytime the snow turning into muddy slush, at nights the muddy slush turning into ice, then thawing again.
I go to the lake, I look at it, not treading on the ice, it’s been too warm the last days, I drink my coffee, I listen. From the woods behind me, bird calls and woodpeckers’ drumming, it’s still not spring, not for many months this high up North, still, they’re preparing, excited, alert, alive. In front of me, the ice is moving. Sometimes the shifting ice makes terrifying sharp bangs, and if you happen to be standing on it, the terror goes through your body, never reaching your conscious mind, just the lizard brain, and you sprint to the shore, although you know well that at the exact place you’re standing the water is knee-deep, you may know that, but there’s no one to tell that to your body. Not this time, though. This time the ice is groaning, whistling, pushing, murmuring, you have a feeling of life happening under it, a hidden, mythical, life, speed, stealth, strength, I wouldn’t be surprised had I seen a pod of whales breaching, slender narwhal horns breaking the surface on our tiny glacier lake, I wouldn’t be surprised at all!
I’m in motion, times of changes and restlessness, of growing and longing, inside: the serene ancestral oak leafs, and magnolia buds bursting into bloom, and a sprig of a tree I know nothing about. Outside: heavy sodden snows on the ground, spring sounds in the air, the ice on the lake is brittle and treacherous, as restless and unsettled as I feel, but it’s moving, it’s moving!
… og vannet under isen blir musikk (Anne Grete Preus)
… and the water below the ice becomes music
